Something Is Happening Around Earth: Inside 2026’s Massive Fireball Surge

• See also:
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  Fireball sightings are surging across the US — here’s what’s really going on
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• Something Is Happening Around Earth: Inside 2026’s Massive Fireball Surge
  by Tibi Puiu, https://www.zmescience.com/
  On a Saturday afternoon this past March, a piece of the solar system plummeted toward a home in north Houston. The one-ton space rock broke apart nearly 30 miles above the city, unleashing a violent sonic boom equivalent to 26 tons of TNT. A dark, jagged fragment smashed through a residential roof and even ricocheted around a bedroom like a cosmic pinball.
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  This would have been stunning in itself, except there were more such meteor strikes. During the first three months of 2026, our planet waded through an unusually dense shooting gallery. The American Meteor Society (AMS) has tracked a staggering wave of large, bright meteors — known as fireballs — lighting up skies from California to Germany.
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  Earth sweeps up tons of space dust every day. Usually, this material is the size of a grain of sand and burns up harmlessly in the upper atmosphere. But right now, we are colliding with much bigger rocks. And scientists are scrambling to figure out why.
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  Mike Hankey, a researcher who manages fireball reporting tools for the AMS, analyzed data stretching back to 2011. He shared his findings in a recent AMS report, noting this meteorite season is distinctly visible.
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  “After years of stable baseline activity, something appears to have shifted,” Hankey wrote in the AMS report. “The signal is consistent across multiple metrics.”
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  A Sonic Boom Every Three Days
  If you look strictly at the raw numbers, the sky doesn’t look like it is falling. In the first quarter of 2026, the AMS recorded 2,046 total fireball events. That is high, but only marginally above the 2,037 events recorded in 2022 for the same three-month window.
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